We brewed an Irish Pale Ale 3 days ago, and I woke up in the middle of the night realizing I've made a mistake, and am hoping someone can help me save my extract batch that required steeping grains.
We steeped the grains for 30 minutes in 3 qts water at 155 deg F. Sparged using 3 qts at 175 deg. Mistakenly, I calculated this to produce 6 qts of wort, and boiled up only 3 1/2 gallons of water.
Just prior to starting the batch, my wife surprised me with a chiller. You can imagine how excited we were to try it out! I think I'll keep her! It took us less than 15 minutes and we were dropping through 90 deg F.
Having experienced over citrussy tasting beer, we descided (along with other techniques) to increase the aeration post boil. The first pour into the fermentor, we realized the spicket was open, we closed it and all prayed that what came out of the spicket wasn't yeast, we all concentrated on the aeration. After four pours, we verified a good (what looked like) kraeuson. We sealed the fermentor, and took a sample after about 15 minutes, and put the fermentor into its cave. OG was 1.058, and it tasted REAL GOOD.
Daily we are checking the fermentation temps to make sure we don't go over 75, we are hovering at 74. We are thinking that the high fermentor temps may be a contributor to our over citrussy taste. we may need to go to the submerge fermentation process for temperature control (We're in So Calif), keeping it cool is the issue.
So we miscalculated qty. twice. We failed to consider grain absorption and we didn't replace (or build in up front for) evaporation during boil. This has resulted in the fermentor qty. being just over 4 gallons at 1.024 @ 74 deg F. By the time I verified the amount in the fermentor (looked through the air lock), the batch has no kraeuson so I'm into conditioning at this point. We like the taste and don't want to mess with adding water.
I'm conserned about exploding bottles. I've searched this site and read all my books regarding conditioning, everything I've found is based on a 5 gallon batch...add 3/4 cup of corn sugar.
How do we calculate how much sugar we should use for conditioning?
Your time and help is appreciated.
We steeped the grains for 30 minutes in 3 qts water at 155 deg F. Sparged using 3 qts at 175 deg. Mistakenly, I calculated this to produce 6 qts of wort, and boiled up only 3 1/2 gallons of water.
Just prior to starting the batch, my wife surprised me with a chiller. You can imagine how excited we were to try it out! I think I'll keep her! It took us less than 15 minutes and we were dropping through 90 deg F.
Having experienced over citrussy tasting beer, we descided (along with other techniques) to increase the aeration post boil. The first pour into the fermentor, we realized the spicket was open, we closed it and all prayed that what came out of the spicket wasn't yeast, we all concentrated on the aeration. After four pours, we verified a good (what looked like) kraeuson. We sealed the fermentor, and took a sample after about 15 minutes, and put the fermentor into its cave. OG was 1.058, and it tasted REAL GOOD.
Daily we are checking the fermentation temps to make sure we don't go over 75, we are hovering at 74. We are thinking that the high fermentor temps may be a contributor to our over citrussy taste. we may need to go to the submerge fermentation process for temperature control (We're in So Calif), keeping it cool is the issue.
So we miscalculated qty. twice. We failed to consider grain absorption and we didn't replace (or build in up front for) evaporation during boil. This has resulted in the fermentor qty. being just over 4 gallons at 1.024 @ 74 deg F. By the time I verified the amount in the fermentor (looked through the air lock), the batch has no kraeuson so I'm into conditioning at this point. We like the taste and don't want to mess with adding water.
I'm conserned about exploding bottles. I've searched this site and read all my books regarding conditioning, everything I've found is based on a 5 gallon batch...add 3/4 cup of corn sugar.
How do we calculate how much sugar we should use for conditioning?
Your time and help is appreciated.
